Yes, like theists, atheists, too, have thoughts about the beginning of the Universe; atheists generally subscribe to two positions: the Universe is, supposedly, eternal, or that the Universe sprung into existence from another universe.

I believe that I will go with whatever evidence-based scientific consensus that exists. Currently, that evidence is limited in that it can only explain what occured immediately after the so-called Big Bang. What was before then, what "caused" it, is unknown, and may never be known. I'm OK with that. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it because I'm not a cosmologist. My major interests lie elsewhere.

But none of that has ANYTHING to do with me being an atheist. I was an atheist long before I was a scientist. I'm an atheist because I don't believe in a god--and that lack of belief was established long before before I ever knew anything about evidence and the scientific way of thinking, I simply didn't believe--never felt any NEED to believe. Still don't.

I do, but my atheism has more to do with finding the claims of magical super Beings both unbelievable and unsupported. You don't need to know what the answer is in order to rule out what the answer cannot be. In terms of my belief, it is very generalized in that since energy cannot be created, nor destroyed, it means energy has always existed and always will. The only thing that energy can do is change/convert into other forms of energy. So I call everything that could possibly exist the Cosmos and the Big Bang was an energy conversion from this Cosmos that began this particular system that we call our universe. Scientists speculate what could have occurred in this Cosmos that triggered this energy conversion.

How many times do you need this explained before you get it? Atheism is a position on a single topic, the claim by theists that a god or gods exist. Atheist reject this claim as unsubstantiated by the evidence provided by theists. That is the one and only defining factor that makes someone an atheist.

Cosmology is not a tenet of atheism. There is not a belief system of atheism that would require atheists to accept any particular model of the origins of the universe, as long as that model doesn't include a god. I can tell you that there is a model that is well supported by the demonstrable evidence and can explain the earliest moments of this presentation of the observable universe. Going backwards to the big bang scientists can explain up to Planck time, or 10^-44 seconds after the start of the big bang began. It is only what happened in that first fraction of a second that they don't know. Since time began only 10^-44 second before that it doesn't make sense to discuss anything but that fraction of a second.

No they have no idea at all, they have faith that it didn't get created by God. So that brings up the question, do they have faith that the universe is eternal or that it was created by something else?

Every time I ask that question I do not get an answer. I don't get an answer because atheists don't know the answer and cannot even speculate, because once they start speculating they are admitting that they have a type of faith that they criticize believers in Allah for having.